TIL (Timeline I Learned)

TIL a struggling C-student at Princeton tried to save his grades by drafting a viable design for a Nagasaki-style atomic bomb using public records. He pulled it off, got an A, and instantly got his paper confiscated by the FBI. [Source, Comments]

TIL: the Old Copper complex, in North America, copper production began around 6500BCE, more than 8500 years ago, in the Great Lakes region. [Source, Comments]

TIL that in 1992, Hoover UK offered two free round-trip flights to the US to anyone who bought £100 of vacuum cleaners. Over 200,000 people qualified upon realizing the vacuums cost less than the tickets, costing Hoover £50 million and forcing the sale of its European division. [Source, Comments]

TIL even though lasers are usually associated with heating things up (e.g. laser cutting), they can also be used for cooling. Laser cooling allows to cool atoms or molecules almost to absolute zero. [Source, Comments]

Til that the returning soldier effect is a statistical trend where more baby boys than usual are born during and right after major wars. [Source, Comments]

TIL about the Bouba/Kiki Effect where most people associate certain sounds with certain shapes. This is consistent across languages and is related to how we describe flavors with sound and emotions with color. [Source, Comments]

TIL about the "Ipuwer Papyrus", a poem written by someone named Ipuwer, describing social disorders occuring in Egypt at the time. The papyrus has been used by some as evidence of the Exodus, claiming it describes the Ten Plagues. Most scholars belive that it is simply poetic imagery. [Source, Comments]

TIL that during Isabella I of Castile’s reign, the chess queen evolved from a weak piece that moved one square diagonally into the most powerful piece on the board. The change began in 15th-century Spain and may have been inspired by Isabella [Source, Comments]

TIL that the Saudi prince who killed his Sudanese male lover in a london hotel suite is the nephew of Prince Abdullah bin Nasser, president of Al-Hilal who had asked Irish player Eamon O Keefe to quit his football career and become his lover [Source, Comments]

TIL that 19th-century grave robbers shipped stolen corpses in barrels of whiskey, then sold the whiskey to unsuspecting drinkers. [Source, Comments]

TIL Folsom Prison Blues was a plagiarism of 1953 track called "Crescent City Blues", [Source, Comments]

TIL the "Taraia Object" discovered in 2020 and believed to be the wreckage of Amelia Earharts plane is actually just a pile of trees [Source, Comments]

TIL indigenous population of Neolithic Britain were predominantly brown-skinned, brown-eyed and dark haired - it was not until the arrival of Bell Beaker culture people that lighter skin, blue eyes and blond hair became more common there. [Source, Comments]

TIL Britain paid slave owners £20 million (roughly 40% of its annual government spending) to abolish slavery in 1833, while the 800,000+ people they enslaved received nothing. British taxpayers continued paying off government debt linked to that compensation until 2015, 182 years later. [Source, Comments]

TIL in a 2017 study, 99% of NFL players' brains tested positive for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) [Source, Comments]

TIL about the Dreadnought Hoax. Horace de Vere Cole and 5 friends, including writer Virginia Woolf, pretended to be Abyssinian (Ethiopian) royals and boarded HMS Dreadnought. It was done at the behest of HMS Hawke, where a friend of Cole's was stationed, as a prank. [Source, Comments]

TIL Capt Kirk never actually said "Beam me up, Scotty". It was said in different ways but never in that exact format. [Source, Comments]

TIL that Charles Lindbergh, famous for his aviation achievements, helped develop a glass pump that kept an entire thyroid gland alive outside the body for up to 21 days in the 1930s [Source, Comments]

TIL the playground equipment 'monkey bars' are misnamed and would be better named gibbon bars, as the arm-over-arm movement on them (brachiation) is not something monkeys can actually do. Gibbons are the only true brachiators, and humans are modified brachiators [Source, Comments]

TIL until 1933–when a deflated balloon caused an airplane to crash—the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons would be released into the sky where they’d eventually burst. [Source, Comments]